Hard Times

                         HARD TIMES

Sometimes I get inspired to write a particular column, and late last Thursday afternoon, when Vertis and I were sitting under our little wooden pergola down by the pond having a little something to drink, a column idea hit me right between the eyes. We were listening to Apple Music via a great little Bose speaker, which along with our IPad, allowed us to hear nearly any artist recorded in the last 50 years, and I just happened to run across an album by Joan Baez. It was her 75^th Birthday album. Well, if you are a child of the 60s Joan is really a turn on, and as that clear, silky voice echoed in our back yard as the shadows lengthened, my mind drifted back to when I first listened to her. I was in college and her songs were on everyone’s playlist.

We smiled and settled in for a pleasant late afternoon of music.  Of course, we started by picking a few of her most popular songs, and then we listened to Joan sing with Emmylou Harris, and the ballad was called Hard Times. Well the lyrics popped up on our IPad, and as the two singers wafted in the steamy, summer afternoon, and as we listened and read the lyrics, memories flooded back. The two singers fit together perfectly musically, and while the song was being played we read the lyrics. Below is one of the several verses:

Let us pause in life’s pleasure and count its many tears, while we all sup sorrow with the poor. There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears. Oh, hard times come again no more.

‘Tis the song, the sign of the weary, hard times, hard times, come again no more. Many days you have lingered all around my door, oh, hard times, come again no more.

Well yes, as the song title indicates the song is about hard times, and that brought a flood of memories. Actually, I think, if you read the lyrics while the song is being played it amplifies the impact of the music, and by the time the song was over we were pretty much washed out mentally. All of the turbulent 60s flashed back as we sat there, and we relived some of those times as the song continued, Vertis said it first, but it was on my lips, “I can’t take it anymore. Play something else.” No, it wasn’t the quality of the voices or the music or the lyrics it was all of them put together intertwined so wonderfully, that it left us a basket case.

Actually, Vertis and I have been poor, but we have never really gone through real hard times. We had food on our table and clothes on our backs, and we knew, if we worked hard, we would be okay. As a pre-teen living on a farm without access to a balanced, wholesome diet, I went through numerous winters where, from bad nutrition, I developed boils and carbuncles on my neck, but never in the spring and summer when our gardens were putting forth more vegetables than we could consume. Yes, of course I worked and our whole family struggled just to make a living, but we never considered that we were going through hard times. It was just the way things were, and although we had to stretch our money to get along, our family never moaned about hard times. Those times were just what they were and hard---meant one thing---hard work, and my upbringing was instilled with a work ethic from my father and mother. Yes, they were trying times, but not really hard times.

After Vertis and I married we were still in college. My mother wasn’t financially able to help us with college expenses, and our part time jobs were all we had to fall back on.  However, even then, Vertis and I considered we were just going through a tight time financially, but with her working at the Baldwin Organ Factory soldering components in organs for $1.35 an hour as I bounced around the University from job to job---simultaneously. I was student manager of the Bough Commons, the dining hall, an employee of the University Bookstore---where I punched the time clock every time I had a had a free hour between classes, and in the late afternoons I worked cleaning cases and sweeping floors at the University Museum on the fourth floor of Old Main. No, we didn’t see many movies or go out to the Venesian Inn very often, but we made it.

 However, there were a few bumps. When Vertis went to the supermarket and checked out, it sometimes went like this.

 “When you hit fifteen dollars stop. Okay?”

“Sure, just a minute, oh… that sack of potatoes put you at $16.50.”

“Okay, hold everything…let’s see if I put this jar of peanut butter back…no that’s not enough…yes, the peanut butter and this box of cereal will do it….I’m sorry, y’all. I’ve got to put this back on the shelf.”

Yes, it was a little embarrassing, but Vertis, who could make her soldering console quota at the Baldwin Organ Factory with a couple of hours to spare while wearing gloves to protect those good-looking fingernails, wasn’t going to let putting back a jar of peanut butter bother her.

Of course, our parents and grandparents didn’t just ignore us, and our frequent trips home weren’t just because we were homesick. When the spring gardens were in we could count on Vertis’s grandparents to load us up with enough vegetables to hold us for a couple of weeks, and even as tight as money was, we could usually count on someone in the family slipping us a twenty.

 In today’s world our children have very little understanding of what hard times are. Most of our adult children and teenagers have never experienced anything like hard times, and they have no understanding of how to cope with the lack of essential services, food, and other amenities we take for granted. No, I’m not someone who goes on and on about our kids not knowing what hard times are, and secretly hope those sassy youngsters find out. Nope, I hope we all have the best of times ahead and none of us will ever experience what past generations went through.

A comment from a good friend, Dr. Jim Shepherd points the way back to what were really hard time.

 “We were lucky to be raised by the Greatest Generation!”  

Yes, looking back on that generation it is sure hard to argue with Jim. That generation lived through true hard times, but to them it was just part of life. However, as steel sharpens steel, those steel sharpened young men and women, who in the 1940s, fought and died for our freedom didn’t pick up courage, daring, bravery, and toughness in training before the War. They had it instilled in them from the time they could walk by our fathers and grandfathers, who did really have hard times, and those hard times had a name; The Great Depression, and those years were real hard times.